CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.

It is a process or methodology used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends. CRM helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers...continue reading the

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a widely-implemented strategy for managing a companys interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processesprincipally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.[1] Customer relationship management describes a company-wide business strategy including customer-interface departments as well as other departments.[2]

Contents
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1 Phases 2 Benefits of CRM 3 Challenges 4 Types/variations o 4.1 Sales force automation o 4.2 Marketing o 4.3 Customer service and support o 4.4 Analytics o 4.5 Integrated/Collaborative o 4.6 Small business o 4.7 Social media o 4.8 Non-profit and membership-based 5 Strategy 6 Implementation o 6.1 Implementation issues o 6.2 Adoption issues 7 Privacy and data security system 8 Market structures 9 Related trends 10 See also 11 Notes and references

[edit] Phases
The three phases in which CRM support the relationship between a business and its customers are to:

Acquire: CRM can help a business acquire new customers through contact management, selling, and fulfillment.[3] Enhance: web-enabled CRM combined with customer service tools offers customers service from a team of sales and service specialists, which offers customers the convenience of one-stop shopping.[3] Retain: CRM software and databases enable a business to identify and reward its loyal customers and further develop its targeted marketing and relationship marketing initiatives.[4]

[edit] Benefits of CRM

The use of a CRM system will confer several advantages to a company:

Quality and efficiency Decreased costs Decision support Enterprise agility

[edit] Challenges
Tools and workflows can be complex, especially for large businesses. Previously these tools were generally limited to contact management: monitoring and recording interactions and communications. Software solutions then expanded to embrace deal tracking, territories, opportunities, and at the sales pipeline itself. Next came the advent of tools for other clientinterface business functions, as described below. These tools have been, and still are, offered as on-premises software that companies purchase and run on their own IT infrastructure. Often, implementations are fragmentedisolated initiatives by individual departments to address their own needs. Systems that start disunited usually stay that way: siloed thinking and decision processes frequently lead to separate and incompatible systems, and dysfunctional processes. Business reputation has become a growing challenge. The outcome of internal fragmentation that is observed and commented upon by customers is now visible to the rest of the world in the era of the social customer, where in the past, only employees or partners were aware of it. Addressing the fragmentation requires a shift in philosophy and mindset within an organization so that everyone considers the impact to the customer of policy, decisions and actions. Human response at all levels of the organization can affect the customer experience for good or ill. Even one unhappy customer can deliver a body blow to a business.[5]

[edit] Types/variations
[edit] Sales force automation

Sales force automation (SFA) involves using software to streamline all phases of the sales process, minimizing the time that sales representatives need to spend on each phase. This allows sales representatives to pursue more clients in a shorter amount of time than would otherwise be possible. At the heart of SFA is a contact management system for tracking and recording every stage in the sales process for each prospective client, from initial contact to final disposition. Many SFA applications also include insights into opportunities, territories, sales forecasts and workflow automation, quote generation, and product knowledge. Modules for Web 2.0 e-commerce and pricing are new, emerging interests in SFA.[1]

[edit] Marketing
CRM systems for marketing help the enterprise identify and target potential clients and generate leads for the sales team. A key marketing capability is tracking and measuring multichannel campaigns, including email, search, social media, telephone and direct mail. Metrics monitored include clicks, responses, leads, deals, and revenue. Alternatively, Prospect Relationship Management (PRM) solutions offer to track customer behaviour and nurture them from first contact to sale, often cutting out the active sales process altogether. In a web-focused marketing CRM solution, organizations create and track specific web activities that help develop the client relationship. These activities may include such activities as free downloads, online video content, and online web presentations.[citation needed]

[edit] Customer service and support

Recognizing that service is an important factor in attracting and retaining customers, organizations are increasingly turning to technology to help them improve their clients experience while aiming to increase efficiency and minimize costs.[6] Even so, a 2009 study revealed that only 39% of corporate executives believe their employees have the right tools and authority to solve client problems.[7]

[edit] Analytics
Relevant analytics capabilities are often interwoven into applications for sales, marketing, and service. These features can be complemented and augmented with links to separate, purpose-built applications for analytics and business intelligence. Sales analytics let companies monitor and understand client actions and preferences, through sales forecasting and data quality. Marketing applications generally come with predictive analytics to improve segmentation and targeting, and features for measuring the effectiveness of online, offline, and search marketing campaigns. Web analytics have evolved significantly from their starting point of merely tracking mouse clicks on Web sites. By evaluating buy signals, marketers can see which prospects are most likely to transact and also identify those who are bogged down in a sales process and need assistance. Marketing and finance personnel also use analytics to assess the value of multi-faceted programs as a whole. These types of analytics are increasing in popularity as companies demand greater visibility into the performance of call centers and other service and support channels,[6] in order to correct problems before they affect satisfaction levels. Support-focused applications typically

include dashboards similar to those for sales, plus capabilities to measure and analyze response times, service quality, agent performance, and the frequency of various issues.

[edit] Integrated/Collaborative
Departments within enterprises especially large enterprises tend to function with little collaboration.[8] More recently, the development and adoption of these tools and services have fostered greater fluidity and cooperation among sales, service, and marketing. This finds expression in the concept of collaborative systems that use technology to build bridges between departments. For example, feedback from a technical support center can enlighten marketers about specific services and product features clients are asking for. Reps, in their turn, want to be able to pursue these opportunities without the burden of re-entering records and contact data into a separate SFA system.

[edit] Small business

For small business, basic client service can be accomplished by a contact manager system: an integrated solution that lets organizations and individuals efficiently track and record interactions, including emails, documents, jobs, faxes, scheduling, and more. These tools usually focus on accounts rather than on individual contacts. They also generally include opportunity insight for tracking sales pipelines plus added functionality for marketing and service. As with larger enterprises, small businesses are finding value in online solutions, especially for mobile and telecommuting workers.

[edit] Social media

Social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are amplifying the voice of people in the marketplace and are having profound and far-reaching effects on the ways in which people buy. Customers can now research companies online and then ask for recommendations through social media channels, making their buying decision without contacting the company. People also use social media to share opinions and experiences on companies, products and services. As social media is not as widely moderated or censored as mainstream media, individuals can say anything they want about a company or brand, positive or negative. Increasingly, companies are looking to gain access to these conversations and take part in the dialogue. More than a few systems are now integrating to social networking sites. Social media promoters cite a number of business advantages, such as using online communities as a source of high-quality leads and a vehicle for crowd sourcing solutions to client-support problems. Companies can also leverage client stated habits and preferences to "hyper-target" their sales and marketing communications.[9] Some analysts take the view that business-to-business marketers should proceed cautiously when weaving social media into their business processes. These observers recommend careful market research to determine if and where the phenomenon can provide measurable benefits for client interactions, sales and support.[10] It is stated[by whom?] that people feel their interactions are peer-to-peer between them and their contacts, and resent company involvement, sometimes responding with negatives about that company.

[edit] Non-profit and membership-based

Systems for non-profit and membership-based organizations help track constituents and their involvement in the organization. Capabilities typically include tracking the following: fundraising, demographics, membership levels, membership directories, volunteering and communications with individuals. Many include tools for identifying potential donors based on previous donations and participation. In light of the growth of social networking tools, there may be some overlap between social/community driven tools and non-profit/membership tools.

[edit] Strategy
For larger-scale enterprises, a complete and detailed plan is required to obtain the funding, resources, and company-wide support that can make the initiative of choosing and implementing a system successfully. Benefits must be defined, risks assessed, and cost quantified in three general areas:

Processes: Though these systems have many technological components, business processes lie at its core. It can be seen as a more client-centric way of doing business, enabled by technology that consolidates and intelligently distributes pertinent information about clients, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness, and market trends. Therefore, a company must analyze its business workflows and processes before choosing a technology platform; some will likely need re-engineering to better serve the overall goal of winning and satisfying clients. Moreover, planners need to determine the types of client information that are most relevant, and how best to employ them.[2] People: For an initiative to be effective, an organization must convince its staff that the new technology and workflows will benefit employees as well as clients. Senior executives need to be strong and visible advocates who can clearly state and support the case for change. Collaboration, teamwork, and two-way communication should be encouraged across hierarchical boundaries, especially with respect to process improvement.[11] Technology: In evaluating technology, key factors include alignment with the companys business process strategy and goals, including the ability to deliver the right data to the right employees and sufficient ease of adoption and use. Platform selection is best undertaken by a carefully chosen group of executives who understand the business processes to be automated as well as the software issues. Depending upon the size of the company and the breadth of data, choosing an application can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more.[2]

[edit] Implementation
[edit] Implementation issues
Increases in revenue, higher rates of client satisfaction, and significant savings in operating costs are some of the benefits to an enterprise. Proponents emphasize that technology should

be implemented only in the context of careful strategic and operational planning.[12] Implementations almost invariably fall short when one or more facets of this prescription are ignored:

Poor planning: Initiatives can easily fail when efforts are limited to choosing and deploying software, without an accompanying rationale, context, and support for the workforce.[13] In other instances, enterprises simply automate flawed client-facing processes rather than redesign them according to best practices. Poor integration: For many companies, integrations are piecemeal initiatives that address a glaring need: improving a particular client-facing process or two or automating a favored sales or client support channel.[14] Such point solutions offer little or no integration or alignment with a companys overall strategy. They offer a less than complete client view and often lead to unsatisfactory user experiences. Toward a solution: overcoming siloed thinking. Experts advise organizations to recognize the immense value of integrating their client-facing operations. In this view, internally-focused, department-centric views should be discarded in favor of reorienting processes toward information-sharing across marketing, sales, and service. For example, sales representatives need to know about current issues and relevant marketing promotions before attempting to cross-sell to a specific client. Marketing staff should be able to leverage client information from sales and service to better target campaigns and offers. And support agents require quick and complete access to a clients sales and service history.[14]

[edit] Adoption issues

Historically, the landscape is littered with instances of low adoption rates. In 2003, a Gartner report estimated that more than $1 billion had been spent on software that was not being used. More recent research indicates that the problem, while perhaps less severe, is a long way from being solved. According to CSO Insights, less than 40 percent of 1,275 participating companies had end-user adoption rates above 90 percent.[15] In a 2007 survey from the U.K., four-fifths of senior executives reported that their biggest challenge is getting their staff to use the systems they had installed. Further, 43 percent of respondents said they use less than half the functionality of their existing system; 72 percent indicated they would trade functionality for ease of use; 51 percent cited data synchronization as a major issue; and 67 percent said that finding time to evaluate systems was a major problem.[16] With expenditures expected to exceed $11 billion in 2010,[16] enterprises need to address and overcome persistent adoption challenges. Specialists offer these recommendations[15] for boosting adoptions rates and coaxing users to blend these tools into their daily workflow:

Choose a system that is easy to use: not all solutions are created equal; some vendors offer applications that are more user-friendly a factor that should be as important to the decision as is functionality. Choose appropriate capabilities: employees need to know that the time they invest in learning and in using the new system will not be wasted, indeed that it will yield personal advantages; otherwise, they will ignore or circumvent the system.

Provide training: changing the way people work is no small task; to be successful, some familiarization training and help-desk support are usually required, even with todays more usable systems. Lead by example: upper management must use the new application themselves, thereby showing employees that the top leaders fully support the application or else it will skew the ultimate course of the initiative toward failure, by risking a greatly reduced rate of adoption by employees.[citation needed]

[edit] Privacy and data security system

One of the primary functions of these tools is to collect information about clients, thus a company must consider the desire for privacy and data security, as well as the legislative and cultural norms. Some clients prefer assurances that their data will not be shared with third parties without their prior consent and that safeguards are in place to prevent illegal access by third parties.

[edit] Market structures

This market grew by 12.5 percent in 2008, from revenue of $8.13 billion in 2007 to $9.15 billion in 2008.[17] The following table lists the top vendors in 2006-2008 (figures in millions of US dollars) published in Gartner studies.[18][19] 2008 Revenue SAP 2,055 Oracle 1,475 Salesforce.com 965 Microsoft 581 Amdocs 451 Others 3,620 Total 9,147 Vendor 2008 Share (%) 22.5 (-2.8) 16.1 10.6 6.4 4.9 39.6 100 2007 Revenue 2,050.8 1,319.8 676.5 332.1 421.0 3,289.1 8,089.3 2007 Share (%) 25.3 16.3 8.3 4.1 5.2 40.6 100 2006 Revenue 1,681.7 1,016.8 451.7 176.1 365.9 2,881.6 6,573.8 2006 Share (%) 26.6 15.5 6.9 2.7 5.6 43.7 100

[edit] Related trends

Many CRM vendors offer Web-based tools (cloud computing) and software as a service (SaaS), which are accessed via a secure Internet connection and displayed in a Web browser. These applications are sold as subscriptions, with customers not needing to invest in purchasing and maintaining IT hardware, and subscription fees are a fraction of the cost of purchasing software outright. The era of the "social customer"[20] refers to the use of social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, customer reviews in Amazon etc) by customers in ways that allow other potential customers to glimpse real world experience of current customers with the seller's products and services. This shift increases the power of customers to make purchase decisions that are informed by other parties sometimes outside of the control of the seller or seller's network. In response, CRM philosophy and strategy has shifted to encompass social

networks and user communities, podcasting, and personalization in addition to internally generated marketing, advertising and webpage design. With the spread of self-initiated customer reviews, the user experience of a product or service requires increased attention to design and simplicity, as customer expectations have risen. CRM as a philosophy and strategy is growing to encompass these broader components of the customer relationship, so that businesses may anticipate and innovate to better serve customers, referred to as "Social CRM". Another related development is Vendor Relationship Management, or VRM, which is the customer-side counterpart of CRM: tools and services that equip customers to be both independent of vendors and better able to engage with them. VRM development has grown out of efforts by ProjectVRM at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Identity Commons' Internet Identity Workshops, as well as by a growing number of startups and established companies. VRM was the subject of a cover story in the May 2010 issue of CRM Magazine[21]. In a 2001 research note, META Group (now Gartner) analyst Doug Laney first proposed, defined and coined the term Extended Relationship Management. He defined XRM as the principle and practice of applying CRM disciplines and technologies to other core enterprise constituents, primarily partners, employees and suppliers...as well as other secondary allies including government, press, and industry consortia.